their human essences to become in some way one person. He had often lain in bed — the bed he had just been granted
- and thought about the minute sloughing-off of skin, the exchange of air as they lay close. He had adapted himself happily
to her night habits. (She sometimes appears to be awake, with her eyes wide open and her teeth grinding lightly.) And not
to forget in this round-up the semen rushing eagerly on its short, Darwinian sprint, the bed-sheets made not grubby by the
spillage, but intimate, even numinous; how she would eat breakfast standing up, unaware that he saw her absolute belief that
she was going to be late as endearingly irrational. And all this she has ignored, because John's claims to intimacy are stronger
than his.
If he doesn't know her mind, how can he know Mendel's? We see through a glass darkly, von Gottberg's wife, Liselotte, had
written to Conrad of her experiences. But this idea of darkness, he thinks, is romantic, a mistake, because it suggests that
we are moving towards light, that we must look closely for the truth, that there is some end in view - religious or personal
or historical or philosophical. He remembers so well that the last time he saw Mendel, breathing air and oxygen through a
plastic tube, he said with his faintly ironic smile, 'Life has no meaning. I rejoice in that. Things are what they are. There
is no more.'
Mendel had written that to him the history of ideas was often more interesting than the ideas themselves: what he meant -Conrad
believes — is that the search for meaning is more revealing than the nostrums, the prescriptions, the ideologies, concocted
in the name of this search. But still he is far from clear about what Mendel had in mind for him. Maybe all he had in mind
— surely plenty — was an extended tutorial in how to live your life. Francine intended something similar, if a little more
practical.
'Conrad,' she said, 'I know you don't really care, but can we get this sorted? Once and for all? And fairly? You have a talent
for putting off very simple matters. In fact you find them almost intolerable.'
'I do.'
'It's a kind of resistance to reality.'
'Oh thanks for that. And I thought I was just lazy. That's the scientific mind for you.'
'I was being polite.'
'I was thinking about how you could possibly have sex with John.'
'Shall we stick to the programme?'
'That's another thing I find difficult.'
For no good reason he debated her every choice, the wedding photographs, the used chequebooks, the Dualit toaster, the curtains
he had never liked. He made a stand over the books and his demands were mostly met, because he had, somehow, a moral lien
over them, although not of course over the medical textbooks. In idle moments — plenty of those in the last nine years — he
has looked through them. It is amazing to him what these doctors know. She thinks it is a matter of pride with him to decline
all opportunities of practical knowledge, but the truth is that when he looks at these textbooks he sees mountains of facts
- even protein molecules require pages of explanations and tricky little diagrams - mountains that he could never have scaled.
Before his rapid decline, his father had often talked about Everest. Mountaineering represented not man's ability to conquer
some turbulent geology, but his ability to make life in his image. Later when he discovered that even the best intentioned
can be disappointed, his father lost his faith in the human enterprise. But back in the fifties it was a young man's task
to subdue chaos wherever it was found; in personal relations or in the garden or in the colonies, the imperative was much
the same. And Conrad sees that ideas have their time: von Gottberg, with his spirit and destiny, belonged to a different time.
Mendel, back then, was already interested in the effect of ideas, often deleterious. He hated particularly the lie at the
heart of Marxism, that ordinary
- and thought about the minute sloughing-off of skin, the exchange of air as they lay close. He had adapted himself happily
to her night habits. (She sometimes appears to be awake, with her eyes wide open and her teeth grinding lightly.) And not
to forget in this round-up the semen rushing eagerly on its short, Darwinian sprint, the bed-sheets made not grubby by the
spillage, but intimate, even numinous; how she would eat breakfast standing up, unaware that he saw her absolute belief that
she was going to be late as endearingly irrational. And all this she has ignored, because John's claims to intimacy are stronger
than his.
If he doesn't know her mind, how can he know Mendel's? We see through a glass darkly, von Gottberg's wife, Liselotte, had
written to Conrad of her experiences. But this idea of darkness, he thinks, is romantic, a mistake, because it suggests that
we are moving towards light, that we must look closely for the truth, that there is some end in view - religious or personal
or historical or philosophical. He remembers so well that the last time he saw Mendel, breathing air and oxygen through a
plastic tube, he said with his faintly ironic smile, 'Life has no meaning. I rejoice in that. Things are what they are. There
is no more.'
Mendel had written that to him the history of ideas was often more interesting than the ideas themselves: what he meant -Conrad
believes — is that the search for meaning is more revealing than the nostrums, the prescriptions, the ideologies, concocted
in the name of this search. But still he is far from clear about what Mendel had in mind for him. Maybe all he had in mind
— surely plenty — was an extended tutorial in how to live your life. Francine intended something similar, if a little more
practical.
'Conrad,' she said, 'I know you don't really care, but can we get this sorted? Once and for all? And fairly? You have a talent
for putting off very simple matters. In fact you find them almost intolerable.'
'I do.'
'It's a kind of resistance to reality.'
'Oh thanks for that. And I thought I was just lazy. That's the scientific mind for you.'
'I was being polite.'
'I was thinking about how you could possibly have sex with John.'
'Shall we stick to the programme?'
'That's another thing I find difficult.'
For no good reason he debated her every choice, the wedding photographs, the used chequebooks, the Dualit toaster, the curtains
he had never liked. He made a stand over the books and his demands were mostly met, because he had, somehow, a moral lien
over them, although not of course over the medical textbooks. In idle moments — plenty of those in the last nine years — he
has looked through them. It is amazing to him what these doctors know. She thinks it is a matter of pride with him to decline
all opportunities of practical knowledge, but the truth is that when he looks at these textbooks he sees mountains of facts
- even protein molecules require pages of explanations and tricky little diagrams - mountains that he could never have scaled.
Before his rapid decline, his father had often talked about Everest. Mountaineering represented not man's ability to conquer
some turbulent geology, but his ability to make life in his image. Later when he discovered that even the best intentioned
can be disappointed, his father lost his faith in the human enterprise. But back in the fifties it was a young man's task
to subdue chaos wherever it was found; in personal relations or in the garden or in the colonies, the imperative was much
the same. And Conrad sees that ideas have their time: von Gottberg, with his spirit and destiny, belonged to a different time.
Mendel, back then, was already interested in the effect of ideas, often deleterious. He hated particularly the lie at the
heart of Marxism, that ordinary
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